Emails to Temporary Marketing Contacts

[SBli3]

Hello,

I'm seeking feedback on how to best import temporary marketing contacts in HubSpot and prevent them from entering our welcome series workflow (without suppressing each list in the workflow). We receive permission-based lists via events and are allowed to send them one marketing email. 

Goals

• Send the one allowed email to the imported list.
• Prevent the entire list from entering the automated welcome series.
• When one of these contacts engages with our website (e.g., fills out a form), they become a marketing contact and join the automated welcome email series.

Note, the welcome series workflow takes any new contacts added to the database, immediately sets them as marketing contacts, and deploys emails.

My thoughts are to create a 3-step workflow using the import list as the trigger: set the contacts to “marketing contact”, send the email, and then set the contacts to “non-marketing contact” status.  Will these actions in a workflow prevent the contact from being set to a marketing contact again via another workflow (the welcome series)?

I remember reading somewhere that there are various HubSpot rules around setting the marketing contact status through workflows vs. actions the customer takes. Once a workflow has set a contact to “non-marketing contact”, then only the customer can opt back into a “marketing contact”. If this is true, then I think my 3-step approach will work.

Thank you for your thoughts and time.

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @SBli3,

Marketing contact status only takes effect on the first day of the next month – until then, they will keep that status: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/account/understand-marketing-contacts-billing

That means that it would not be a reliable property for the process you're designing. Instead, I would suggest the following:

1. Create a contact property "Single email consent"
2. When importing contact, set it to Yes/true
3. Use 'Edit record' in a workflow to clear it when a contact becomes eligible to receive emails (e.g. upon form submission)
4. Set up welcome series to exclude contacts that have this property set to Yes/true

In general however, it sounds like your welcome series enrollment criteria are set up too broadly if they're pulling imported contacts. As a best practice, try to narrow them down so that they do not enroll all imported contacts. It's a lot safer to use a "Enroll in welcome series" property, for example, that triggers enrollment, which you set via import. That way, you can decide for each import which contact should enter the journey and which one shouldn't. I would always prefer this over a solution that enrolls everyone by default.

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions!